Wierd moments of our time.

Between about three and five yesterday afternoon we had not one but a string of underage operators on. This is a colossal bother for absolutely everyone: me, the operator, the customers, the trading standards stooges...

It is no wonder businesses such as ours are disinclined to offer work to under-age applicants, and at least one no longer will take them on as operators. This looks like age discrimination but it is in fact a pragmatic business decision. At many levels under-age employees are a great nuisance and frankly overall they're more trouble than they're worth; the draw backs of having someone 16 or 17 on a check-out are just one aspect of this.

Time and time again, and whenever I'm not advocating setting up a have-all-you-think-you-can-handle stall outside to supply those not yet 18 with as much booze as they want free of charge, I've proposed an in-house 'off-licence' entirely separate from the main store, staffed only by mature employees, subject to entry restrictions akin to those of a public house, covered by genuinely effective security both to prevent under-age entry and theft.

No-one listens, or rather they do and then they dismiss the idea on the grounds that the customers won't like it. The customers don't like being asked to prove they're old enough to purchase age restricted products, the customers don't like having to queue, the customers don't like it when the card payment system falls over (a frequent occurrence). The list of things the customers don't like is long, but except when it comes to making changes to emphatically deal with the theft-and-under-age-drinking issue we're Grade A wimps.

And yet yesterday afternoon we, which is to say the disgruntled customers and I, were able to bond over a conspiratorial nudge-nudge. Oops, there goes another bottle of wine into my trolley; slap me now and get it over and done with and save me from myself. The situation was not so much absurd as it was surreal when the general bonding session over 'middle-class excess' extended to a shared moment by a monstrous Torygraph buyer and a Hippy-freak Guardianista. Weird